Senate committee approves same-sex registry, rights

April 1, 2013|By Kathleen Haughney Tallahassee Bureau

TALLAHASSEE — Less than a week after the Supreme Court heard arguments on the legality of gay marriage, a panel of Florida senators approved the state's first domestic partner registry that would guarantee specific rights to gay and lesbian partners.

Sen. Eleanor Sobel, D-Hollywood, said that the committee had "made history."

"We look forward to making this reality eventually in the state of Florida because it's really about fundamental fairness," she said, though advocates acknowledged the bill has little chance of passage this year.

The 5-4 vote on SB 196 by the Senate Committee on Children, Families and Elder Affairs came without any debate from lawmakers and no testimony from the gay rights community; the vote had twice been postponed, once to rewrite the bill and once because a supporter would be absent.

But advocates said the outcome was a forceful statement in favor of more rights for the gay community in Florida.

"This is the first time the Florida Legislature has ever voted to recognize same-sex relationships and provide protections for committed couples all over the state of Florida who cannot or choose not to be married," said Mallory Wells, a lobbyist for Equality Florida, which organized members of the gay community to travel to Tallahassee in the past month to lobby on behalf of the bill. "So this is a historic day certainly for us."

Wells said the group was "celebrating" even though the bill had an uphill climb ahead.

Sobel's bill creates a registry for same-sex and opposite-sex partners who are unmarried and lays out specific rights that the partners would have in Florida, including guaranteed hospital or prison visitation. They could make long-term care decisions or funeral arrangements if needed. They would be among the relatives notified in the event of an emergency. They would have the same property rights as spouses who buy a house together and could inherit from each other.

Eighteen municipalities already have local domestic registries including Orange, Palm Beach, Broward and Miami-Dade counties. The most recent was Leon County, which passed an ordinance last month.

Mary Meeks, an Orlando lawyer who helped draft the Orange County domestic partnership registry last year and Sobel's bill, said that they used the local ordinances as "benchmarks" for the Senate version.

At a previous meeting, lawmakers had expressed concern that Sobel's bill was too broadly written. It basically guaranteed that any rights available to married couples under Florida law would be available to domestic partners as well. Those concerns forced Sobel back to the drawing board.

Still, religious conservatives called the bill a step toward legalizing gay marriage, which Floridians banned in a constitutional amendment passed in 2008.

"The Florida Legislature should have nothing to do with shacking up and redefining marriage," said Pam Olsen, founder of the Florida Prayer Network.

Meeks said she could not "make any sense" of how opponents could compare the rights laid out in Sobel's bill to marriage. Most notably, their partnership would not be recognized in another state as marriage would. In addition — as the Supreme Court head last week in arguments over the federal Defense of Marriage Act — there are hundreds of tax benefits that marriage confers on couples that domestic partners aren't eligible for.

It has four more committee stops in the Senate and has not yet been heard at all in the House. Meeks said supporters didn't necessarily expect it to pass out of Sobel's committee, so she said they were going to "give it our best shot" and hope for future hearings.

Still, the issue is gaining momentum. A recent Washington Post-ABC News poll found that 58 percent of people nationally endorsed gay marriage, and the approval rate was far higher for voters under 30.

And recent poll by Public Policy Polling, a Democratic-affiliated North Carolina-based firm, found that 75 percent of Florida voters support at least civil unions for gay couples, compared to 23 percent who think there should be no legal recognition. However, 60 percent of voters said they had no opinion of Sobel's domestic partnership bill, while 23 percent supported and 17 opposed it.

"Those numbers mostly reflect the average voter not paying much attention to the Legislature," the firm wrote.